John Nicholson was brought up in Stockton-on-Tees and has been a Boro fan since 1970. A prolific writer, he's published 16 books, had a hugely popular column on football365.com for 17 years. Nicholson is the author of the massively successful Nick Guymer crime novels series, set on Teesside. He'll be writing a series of columns for Gazette Boro Premium.

The campaign to have safe standing in football grounds is starting to get some traction this season, with Celtic putting aside 3,000 ‘rail seats’ for those fans who prefer not to wedge their backside into a cold plastic seat.

All over Europe, especially in Germany, standing is commonplace and a great many of us would love to see it happen here. But for it to be reintroduced in England, the Football Spectators Act of 1989 would need to be overturned. Funny, but I’ve never felt like I was a ‘spectator’ at a game. A fan or a crowd, but not a spectator.

It’s an oddly arcane word, appropriately enough, for a bill introduced by what was an oddly arcane Tory government.

Standing up was never dangerous per se, it was how it was organised and policed that was dangerous. Though massively overcrowded terraces were not something that we had to worry about very often at the Boro, when you see the old footage of Liverpool’s Kop, surging forwards and backwards like a human tide, in this era of health and safety assessments, it looks scarcely believable that it was the norm for a hundred years.

But those worrying it’s a backward step towards Hillsborough really shouldn’t be concerned. We know how to organise and police crowds now. The mistakes of the past have been learned.

Seating can make for a rather passive, sterile atmosphere, where fans really are mere spectators, sitting, staring at the football like it’s on the TV. And it doesn’t always prevent trouble breaking out.

John Nicholson

I was at last year’s Scottish League Cup final when some Hibernian fans came to blows with each other because one group kept standing up and obscuring the view of those behind. Admittedly, Hibs fans are an especially grumpy lot, but even so, it does raise the issue of when it’s OK to stand up and when it’s not.

It is really annoying if some massive wall of meat keeps obscuring your sight of the game by getting to their feet, but if you do likewise, you risk being the same problem for someone else. It’s all very awkward.

Standing up is likely to improve the atmosphere at games, which is badly needed sometimes. While watching Spurs play Everton last weekend, even though it was a good game, like so many top flight matches, it often went so quiet you could hear the managers shouting instructions on the touchline. At times it feels like people have got bored and are all looking at their phones, distracted by what Jenny or Josh is doing with their dog in the park.

Standing allows you to express yourself better. You’re less constrained. You’re less likely to aggravate your haemorrhoids and, in an age where we’re all getting fatter, it burns off more calories.

As long as we can persuade people not to start a waterfall of urine spilling from top the terrace to the bottom, as used to happen on the Anfield Kop, it’s a very positive move and to be honest, not passing water while watching football is easy. I’d go so far as to say I’m great at it and I’m sure most other people are too. So there shouldn’t be any problems.

Back in the 70s when I went to Ayresome Park, we always stood on the Holgate. We never thought of sitting. The seats were for rich people, posh people and old people. That’s what we thought.

The Holgate wall, pictured in 2013 (Image: Peter Reimann)

Also, it has to be said the darker recesses of the Holgate offered the chance for covert intimate encounters and that’s exactly what happened to a pal of mine.

It was his 17th birthday and as a present his petite girlfriend - who was the spitting image of Suzi Quatro, sadly minus the leather jumpsuit (I don’t think you could have bought a leather jumpsuit on Teesside in the mid-70s. Maxwell’s or Binns certainly didn’t sell them!) - promised him a gift he’d never forget which combined his only two passions in life: Boro and sex.

Now, if the Boro ever do reintroduce standing and you want to try this for yourself you will need one small girlfriend, a large old floor-length army coat, and a predilection for easily provoked lust. And so it was that in the darkness of the back of the stand one boring 0-0 Tuesday night game in early December 1976 against Manchester City, he opened the coat, fastened it around the small kneeling form of his girlfriend and received, what the textbooks used to call “oral pleasuring” without anyone except we, his three mates, knowing.

We were naive kids, a couple of years younger than the birthday boy and though we pretended we knew what she was doing, in reality we had no idea. I really thought it involved actual blowing, in the manner of inflating a balloon, which on reflection, might actually be very unpleasant and possibly even dangerous.

It might not sound like it, but the 70s were more innocent days. In such regards, we knew nowt about owt.

David Armstrong playing for Boro in 1978 (Image: collect unknown)

The under-coat adventures soon came to a head, just as the balding, blonde, bustling David Armstrong was bearing down on goal, striking the ball into the side netting. The ‘oooh’ from the crowd conveniently masked the lad’s briefly irrepressible noises of passion. The rather lovely, triumphant girl soon emerged, raised both arms in the air and shouted “one nil!”.

We tried to be cool, but weren’t sure if we were in love with her, or scared by her, or both.

Now, you try doing that at the Boro in one of the red plastic seats today. There’s not enough room, for a start and even if you tried, people would probably complain it was putting them off the crucial business of stuffing pizza and chips into their faces, which seems as important as the football, to some people these days.

Reintroducing standing will make match day more fun, more noisy, less stressful, cheaper and, if you’re lucky, it’ll play an important part in your sex education. So please, be upstanding for standing up.